ANNIE ERNAUX, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the
author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, winner of the
Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place, and of the Marguerite Yourcenar
Prize for her body of work. She is also the winner of the
International Strega Prize and the French-American Translation
Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for
The Years. In 2019 she was the recipient of the Prix Formentor. She
is now considered to be France's most important literary voice, and
is the first French woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
ALISON L. STRAYER is a Canadian writer and translator. Her work has
been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Literature
and for Translation, the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal, and the
Prix litteraire France-Quebec. She lives in Paris.
“A sublime book.” —Elle
"That Ernaux can do so much — The Young Man tackles love,
aging, desire, loss, misogyny, class and death — in such a small
space is clearly the hallmark of a writer who has honed her craft
to be razor sharp. It cuts to the bone." —Jessica Ferri, The
Washington Post
“The major pleasure in reading this book—and it is a major
pleasure—comes not so much from gasping over sensual details but
from savoring Ernaux’s sentences and the searing clarity of her
thinking. It isn’t just that she avoids sentimentality, though she
does that, too. It’s that the author can (and does) analyze all
kinds of intersecting threads—aging, class, desire, regret—without
a sense of shame or an impulse to sugarcoat any of the truths she
uncovered during her time with A. . . . A crucial addition to
Ernaux’s oeuvre.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"A romance on its face, The Young Man gathers singularity and
texture as an account of manifold transits: between youth and age,
living and dying, in and out of passion, passing through menopause,
and from Ernaux’s impoverished beginnings through her ascension
into the literary bourgeoisie." —Bookforum
"Gripping. . . . Nobel prize winning writer Annie Ernaux’s
recounts her fervent love affair with A., a man 30 years her
junior." —Nylon
"In the sensitive hands of Annie Ernaux and her translator Alison
L. Strayer, a slim and seemingly salacious story of a woman’s love
affair with a much younger man transforms into a profound
exploration of power and domination, of reliving through writing,
and of how passion elevates us to a kind of agelessness." —Words
Without Borders
"A meditation on a dalliance that made [French author and 2022
Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux] think differently about love,
time, and aging." —TIME magazine, Most Anticipated Books for Fall
2023
“The Young Man is more than the story of an affair. It’s an intense
re-examination of the past. . . . [Ernaux's] memoirs ask us to
cultivate different expectations for narrative, and perhaps for
life: to seek not novelty but rather the familiar, which surprises
in its own way." —Maggie Doherty, The New Republic
"Prevalent in [Ernaux's] work are acts of remembering—how memory is
not a distant, unreachable thing but something that stalks the
present. Reliving those wild days with a younger man triggers a
meditation on age and mortality."—The Guardian
"In lean prose, [Ernaux] moves from description to scrutiny with
accuracy. She writes the way the body recalibrates the past. . .
. It is a story that compels us to revisit our own past,
and to wonder if we share Ernaux’s unflinching clarity about
recognizing the dial of life."—World Literature Today
"Nobel Prize winner Ernaux recounts her yearlong affair with a
man three decades her junior in this slim yet stunning memoir. . .
. Remarkably clear-eyed about the relationship’s pitfalls and
pleasures, Ernaux shares, in fragments, the ways it provoked within
her both a sense of righteousness. . . and sadness. . . . The
result is a poignant and essential addition to Ernaux’s oeuvre."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Once again the work of the writer Annie Ernaux appears as both a
rigorous study of life and an experiment. These fragments of
living, however evanescent, are precious, irreplaceable, like a
skin that never fades.” —Caroline Montpetit, Le Devoir
"[Annie Ernaux]—ever attentive to the dynamics of memory, the
dissolution of sex, and the process of writing—knows that this
timeless quality isn’t, and can’t be, quite the same as seeing time
flow in reverse." —Asymptote Journal
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